Africa Center Senior Fellow Sean McFate writes for the New York Times on the rise of private military contractors and how their rise is already shaping foreign policy globally:
Ten years ago, I found myself in Burundi, sipping a Coke with the country’s president, the American ambassador and the president’s eight-year-old daughter. The president’s life was in danger, and the American government sent me in to keep him alive.
The Rwandan genocide had begun in 1994 after the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda were assassinated. In 2004, an extremist Hutu group planned on assassinating the new president of Burundi to reignite it. My job was to prevent this from happening.